Carrie Johnson

As chief research officer, Carrie leads a global research organization responsible for creating powerful ideas and objective, courageous, and relevant content that helps Forrester’s clients win, serve, and retain customers.

Prior to this role, Carrie held various research positions in Forrester’s research organization over the past 20 years, including SVP of research and group director for the eBusiness and channel strategy and B2B marketing roles. As an analyst before that, Carrie researched the dynamics and growth of online retailing. In this role, she analyzed consumers’ adoption of eCommerce, their multichannel behavior, and how retailers optimize sales to those consumers with key technologies and strategies.

Previous Work Experience

Carrie's background prior to Forrester includes work at the Harvard Business School, where she wrote case studies on Barnes & Noble, Frontgate, PlanetAll, QVC, Streamline, and TV Guide.

Education

Carrie Johnson

As chief research officer, Carrie leads a global research organization responsible for creating powerful ideas and objective, courageous, and relevant content that helps Forrester’s clients win, serve, and retain customers.

Prior to this role, Carrie held various research positions in Forrester’s research organization over the past 20 years, including SVP of research and group director for the eBusiness and channel strategy and B2B marketing roles. As an analyst before that, Carrie researched the dynamics and growth of online retailing. In this role, she analyzed consumers’ adoption of eCommerce, their multichannel behavior, and how retailers optimize sales to those consumers with key technologies and strategies.

Previous Work Experience

Carrie's background prior to Forrester includes work at the Harvard Business School, where she wrote case studies on Barnes & Noble, Frontgate, PlanetAll, QVC, Streamline, and TV Guide.

eBusiness budgets rose again in 2011 and will keep rising in 2012. Why? Competition is heating up. The average eBusiness team is still maturing, and B2B firms increasingly are entering the eBusiness fray. Even companies with mature eBusiness operations have to keep up with evolving digital touchpoints like mobile as well as costly technology projects. In addition, increased investment in digital marketing by all firms is beginning to push online customer acquisition costs higher. This report updates our annual eBusiness spending and customer acquisition benchmarks and discusses how eBusiness professionals can acquire the budget and resources they need to stay competitive with their peers.

Like mobile measurement, mobile benchmarking is still in its infancy. Hard-to-come-by benchmarks challenge eBusiness and channel strategy professionals to understand how their investment levels compare with their peers', and more importantly which mobile offerings and functionality set the bar for mobile customer experiences. In the report "Mobile Measurement Is An eBusiness Imperative," Forrester outlined a foundational strategy for mobile key performance indicators (KPIs). In this report, the benchmarking component of the mobile eBusiness playbook, we provide two types of benchmarks to get eBusiness and channel strategy professionals started with mobile benchmarking efforts: supply-side investment levels from online retailers and methodology-driven rankings of mobile banking functionality.

As mobile adoption increases, eBusiness and channel strategy professionals are challenged to determine how these devices integrate with their existing sales and service channels. It is imperative that eBusiness professionals configure their overall resources and capabilities to stay ahead of the rate of change as consumer technology adoption and behaviors change. Yet finding people with the skills required to push mobile initiatives forth is difficult. In many cases eBusiness professionals will need to look outside of their own organizations to find support in this early-stage of rapid mobile development. This report gives an overview of the key staffing and organizational issues that mobile presents to eBusiness professionals today.

What is the goal of eBusiness teams? To sell goods and services. As a result, eBusiness teams have become masters in the art of sales. As teams pivot efforts to optimize interactions across digital touchpoints, though, eBusiness teams find that they need more scientific skills in the form of data analysis and technical skills. A successful eBusiness strategy must marry the art as well as the science, and the marketer with the programmer. In past research, we found that firms were having a difficult time filling many positions and were turning to other industries for eBusiness talent. In this document, we expand on that research with a look at the critical functions of the eBusiness team, and we examine how those teams are blending the art and science of selling to staff up for the next evolution of digital sales and service.

Unemployment plagues the US, yet eBusiness and channel strategy professionals face a counterintuitive problem — hiring. They struggle to fill customer experience, IT, and business analyst roles. Plus, eBusiness leaders are in short supply. In this document we benchmark eBusiness team sizes by company size, worldwide employee base, and online revenue. We also analyze why some jobs are harder to hire for than others and give recommendations on how to build best-in-class eBusiness teams.

Across the globe, the mobile channel is growing at a rapid rate. eBusiness and channel strategy leaders at B2B and B2C firms are at the forefront: 94% of eBusiness managers we surveyed are either responsible for or involved in the planning of a mobile strategy. Unclear strategies for the channel, lack of expertise, and technical challenges hinder execution, though, as eBusiness professionals race to catch up with skyrocketing consumer adoption of mobile activities. Creating a mobile strategy requires cross-functional cooperation, a methodical approach to strategy creation that starts by examining customer use of the channel, and clearly defined metrics. eBusiness and channel strategy professionals must determine how the mobile channel's unique characteristics of simplicity, immediacy, and context can translate into multichannel, cross-channel, or mobile-only offerings.

Our research still shows that despite the adoption of online transactions, consumers prefer in-store experiences over the Web when it comes to researching, buying, and getting customer service. This somewhat counterintuitive data points to the biggest challenge that eBusiness executives face — creating an online value proposition and experience that go beyond simple order taking.

As consumers increasingly use social media to connect with each other and with brands, eBusiness executives seek to understand how — and if — these tools can drive online sales and service. To see how far along eBusiness professionals are in their social strategies, we examined consumer data on social media usage and then surveyed eBusiness leaders on the tools that they're offering. We found that when it comes to social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, consumers and eBusiness teams are on fairly even ground. eBusiness executives use social media tools today to drive brand and product awareness, and they report that ratings and reviews are the most effective tactic for driving sales. To see better online sales and service results from other social initiatives, eBusiness professionals must set a clear strategy that considers their customers' usage of social media first, optimizes social media to lower customer service costs, and has measurable ROI.

Consumers today are more multichannel than ever before: 70% of consumers researched a product online and then bought it in another channel in 2009. To determine the role that eBusiness teams play in crafting and executing their overall corporate multichannel strategy, we surveyed members of our eBusiness And Channel Strategy Professional Research Panel about their cross-channel efforts and how they prioritize channel investments for 2010. We found that many eBusiness leaders have reporting and P&L responsibility today for much more than just the Web channel, and they often have a seat at the table to plan channel strategies. When it comes to executing those strategies, however — and effectively implementing cross-channel interactions — there is definite room for improvement.

Reporting structures are a challenge for any team, and eBusiness is no exception: Finding the right place for eBusiness teams as the Web evolves and grows in importance has been a struggle for most firms. In our latest eBusiness & channel strategy professional research survey, we found that a shift is on in eBusiness organizational models: In late 2008, 42% of respondents to our survey operated teams in a centralized structure, whereas as of late 2009, the shared service model had taken the lead going into 2010. What do panelists believe is the ideal reporting structure? Hint: "Decentralized" barely makes it onto the radar screen. We also learned that, while companies overall seem to really understand the role and relationship of the eBusiness organization to corporate success, support in terms of funding and evangelism is still lacking at most companies, regardless of sales model, industry, or geography.